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Seventy-five years after Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor shattered the U.S. Pacific Fleet and the America First movement, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has resurrected the slogan and seemingly embraced an isolationist concept rejected by every president since World War II as a naïve retreat from a turbulent world.
In a major address last Wednesday, Trump ridiculed the basic premises of American foreign policy throughout the nuclear age, declaring that “America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”
“Americans must know that we are putting the American people first again on trade … on immigration, on foreign policy,” Trump said. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.”
His use of “America First” sent a seismic jolt through U.S. foreign policy establishment, with its clear reference to the isolationist sentiment of the 1930s advocated by legendary flyer Charles Lindbergh and General Robert E. Wood, the then chairman of the board of Sears Roebuck.
Both men held the view that the U.S. had no business entering the European conflict against Nazi Germany.
“For those who know what it stands for and remember history, I think it’s discredited,” said Lynne Olson, author of “Those Angry Days,” a 2013 book that details Lindbergh and the America First movement. “Most people today don’t know what America First was. They don’t focus on Lindbergh.”
Evan Thomas, who co-authored “The Wise Men,” a 1986 book about post-World War II efforts of Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and Averill Harriman to forge a major U.S. role in the world, said the concept of an America in isolation has appeal but isn’t remotely possible.
“The world is just a messy awful place and why can’t we just pull up our drawbridge? It is tempting,” he said. “But it doesn’t work. It may have worked in the 19th century, but in the modern age it doesn’t work. People have missiles which can reach you.”
‘Their days are numbered’
Trump, who is within grasp of the Republican presidential nomination, did not directly advocate a policy of strict isolationism. He vowed the United States would be “a great and reliable ally again” and warned Islamic State militants “their days are numbered.”
But he clearly played the America First card when he said, “We’re rebuilding other countries while weakening our own,” and he warned that if America’s allies in Europe and Asia do not spend more on defense, then the United States “must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”
He finished with a sharp attack on international trade, contending trade pacts such as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement have been “a total disaster.”
NAFTA, he said, has “literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs.”
Not everyone was critical of the speech. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in a series of tweets, wrote that the speech was filled with serious ideas and that Trump “said the most important word correctly: America. He gets it.”
Trump’s speech was designed to resonate with Americans weary of seemingly endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, resentful of spending hundreds of billions of dollars for the world’s greatest military, and angry because they see their jobs vanishing because of international trade or illegal immigration.
Christopher McKnight Nichols, a professor of history at Oregon State University who specializes in the 1930s isolationism movement, said Trump was “tapping into the same sentiment that was there in the 1930s and early 1940s — that America had overreached.”
But critics, such as Peter Mansoor, who holds the Gen. Raymond E. Mason Jr. chair in military history at Ohio State University, said Trump was off-base with some of his criticisms.
“The U.S. has benefitted from the world order we helped shape and create since World War II,” he said. “Our alliances around the world provide us with the infrastructure to project power.”
Mansoor, who served as executive officer in Iraq to former Army General David Petraeus, added: “It would be difficult to think how we would fight the Islamic State without bases in Turkey, Europe and Jordan.”
Lindbergh and Roosevelt clash
Like Trump, who has called for deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and a pause in allowing Muslims to enter the country, America First flirted with opposition to certain groups.
In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in September of 1941, Lindbergh said “the three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.”
The two American icons — Lindbergh and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — continued to clash over America’s involvement in the war, and Lindbergh supporters and some biographers later accused Roosevelt of conducting a smear campaign against the famous aviator.
America First disbanded three days after Pearl Harbor. Except for Pat Buchanan’s 1996 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, few politicians have tried to revive America First.
“I think it was a deliberate choice of words,” Lynne Olson said of Trump’s speech. While the author acknowledged that U.S. architects of the post-war world “went too far” — such as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq — “we are involved in the world today,” she said. “The world would be a far less secure place if we had a president who really felt that way.”
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